


You've Consumed My Waking Days

by Black_Hole_of_Procrastination



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-18 00:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9352499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Hole_of_Procrastination/pseuds/Black_Hole_of_Procrastination
Summary: She is madwoman for fretting on it so, she knows, but it is Jon’s fault. How dare he cravenly write such things when he is too far away for her to demand he explain himself?Salty teens AU meets ‘Hamilton’ style comma sexting (with a little embarrassing!Dad Rhaegar and Stark sister bonding thrown in for good measure).





	

**Author's Note:**

> Finally got around to posting this on AO3. Followup chapter to come.

Sansa feels the mattress dip as her lord husband climbs under the furs beside her. She keeps her back turned to him and her eyes screwed shut, feinting sleep. She thinks she has nearly succeeded in fooling him, when the weight of a gentle hand presses on her shoulder.

“Sansa? Sansa, are you awake?”

She can smell the ale on his breath. He’s been drinking with Robb and Theon.

 _No doubt toasting to their forthcoming victory_ , she thinks sourly.

Jon huffs out a sigh when she remains stubbornly curled to her side, and he settles back onto his side of the mattress.

With all of Father’s bannerman descended upon Winterfell, they needs share a room. Mother has put them up in Sansa’s girlhood chambers, and while Sansa is sure it was meant as a kindness, Sansa cannot help but feel that it is strange be here with her husband.

She remembers the last time she slept in this bed. It was the eve of her wedding, and she’d laid awake half the night, dreamy with hopes for her future with her southron prince.

Sansa thinks back on that silly girl she had been, and pities her. She’d had no actual notion of what it is to be wed. To be hurried off to some castoff keep, forgotten and so desperately lonely. To spend each day tediously hunched over the household accounts and squabbling with stewards and cooks and merchants like some shrill fishwife, while her husband hid himself away in the training yard. To be tied to a man who had no inclination towards music or dancing or anything that could be considered the least bit diverting.

But Sansa is being too cruel, for it is not all so bad. There are aspects of married life that the innocent girl she’d once been could not possibly have dreamed up. Things that would bring a maidenly blush to that girl’s cheek.

It would be so easy. To turn around and tuck herself against Jon’s warmth. To let Jon bear her back against the feather ticking of the bed and murmur sweet, feverish thing into her skin until she’d forgotten precisely why she is so wroth with him.

But Sansa cannot forget what awaits them with the dawn, and so she lies still.

 _He best get used to keeping a cold bed_ , she thinks, listening to the sounds of Jon shifting restlessly beside her.

For a moment, Sansa finds herself absurdly longing for Queenscrown. At least in their own shabby keep she might bar the door against Jon and make him sleep in their solar. To do so here, though, is unthinkable. The difficulties of Sansa’s marriage are her own private shame, and she would rather carry on with this sorry mummery with Jon than ever give her parents reason to think anything amiss.

Their parting is an uncomfortable affair.

The entire household is gathered to see off Father and his men, servants and smallfolk pressed tightly together in the courtyard as horses are saddled and sledges are packed with provisions for the journey.

From the corner of her eye she can see where Father stands, holding Mother’s hand and speaking in a low, urgent voice. Not far from them, Alys is weeping, clinging to the furs at Robb’s shoulders as he quiets her with fervent kisses.

Sansa feels the weight of every eye in Winterfell upon them as Jon steps before her. There are no gentle words or kisses. Only Jon shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, his brows drawn together in a frown.

“I will be back soon,” Jon promises, when she makes no effort to speak. “You’ll scarcely know I’m gone.” She doesn’t miss the bitter note in his voice, and Sansa finds her heart thawing towards him.

He fidgets with his gloves. They’re an old pair she’s mended more times than she can count, but they are warm and will serve him well enough.

 _There shall be no one to mend them at the Wall_ , she thinks suddenly, and for the first time Sansa considers that for as eager as her husband seems to gain glory in battle, Jon might miss her while he is away just a little bit.

She is searching for a proper response, when Jon draws closer, one hand anchored on her upper arm as he leans to drop a featherlight kiss to her temple.

“Be well,” he says gruffly, before turning to mount his grey palfrey.

Sansa watches the men ride forth from the East Gate and tells herself she is glad of it. Glad to be home. Glad to be with her mother. Glad to no longer have Jon always sulking underfoot.

She waits until she is alone in her chambers before she allows herself to cry.

It’s almost a sennight before she finds the letter. She discovers it on her dressing table, wedged between the pages of a volume of Lyseni love poems she keeps there.

The book was a wedding present from her goodfather. It is very beautiful, with gold leaf inlaid in the cover and intricate illuminations on every page, and the poems translated by King Rhaegar’s own hand!

Sansa had thrilled to receive such a gift, but she remembers too well her dismay when her newly made husband had scoffed as it was presented during their wedding feast with his father’s best wishes. Since that day, Sansa has taken careful pains to keep volume close at hand, reading from it often, knowing how it needled at Jon to see her lovingly thumbing through it’s pages.

It seems a peculiar hiding place for Jon to have chosen, though no odder than the notion of Jon writing her a letter at all, she supposes.

She knows it must be from Jon. It is his hand that has scrawled her name across the front of the parchment. She recognizes from long nights spent in their solar at Queenscrown, where she has cast more glances at him scratching away in ledgers than she’s willing to own to.

She has half a mind to burn the letter without even reading it (it is no more than Jon deserves, leaving her at Winterfell while he runs off to play at war with Robb) but her curiosity wins over her temper.

She waits until her maids have left her for the evening before breaking the seal.

The letter is brief and dull. Jon is no poet. Sansa knows this. She is too used to his sullen silences to ever think that. Still, she can’t help but feel disappointed as she wades through line after line of Jon’s halting courtesies. He writes of his well wishes for her family and her health, his words almost entirely lacking in sentiment or any kind of affection.

She’s skimmed nearly to the letter’s end, her annoyance growing with every empty word, when one line draws her attention.

_“My dearest, Sansa”_

She reads the line over once, and then once more, certain she is mistaken, but there it remains, scratched in Jon’s cramped, familiar lettering:

_“My dearest, Sansa”_

Her husband is not one to use endearments. To Jon, she is only ‘my lady’ and ‘Sansa’ and sometimes an impertinent ‘wife’ when he is particularly set on vexing her.

(Of course there are the things he whispers in her ear when they are abed, his breath warm on her cheek as he moves maddeningly within her, but those do not bear repeating let alone being put to paper!)

It is the comma, more than the words themselves, that throws Sansa. Jon is a man of intention, and Sansa cannot help but wonder what Jon is trying to tell her with that single mark on the page. To be Jon’s ‘dearest Sansa’ would be a thing shocking onto itself, but to be ‘his dearest’ is so completely foreign Sansa cannot bring herself to believe it.

She rereads the letter half a hundred times in the weeks that follow, each time trying to divine new meaning from its words. The parchment becomes worn and soft as cloth from being folded and crumpled and smoothed so many times over. Once, in a fit of pique, she tosses it into her hearth only to desperately pull it from the flames seconds later, salvaging the letter but burning her fingers in the process.

She is madwoman for fretting on it so, she knows, but it is Jon’s fault. How dare he cravenly write such things when he is too far away for her to demand he explain himself?

The family are breaking their fast when news of a raven from the Wall comes. Maester Luwin is so very solemn looking as he approaches the high table, all seem to hold their breath as he speaks.

A ranging party has been lost beyond the Wall. It was led by Uncle Benjen and Jon.

Underneath the table Sansa fists her trembling hands into the fabric of her gown and tries to act a lady, instead of blubbering into her Mother’s skirts as she longs to do.

It is Alys who cries, out of relief and worry for Robb, Sansa supposes. Mother runs a consoling hand over Alys’s back, murmuring words of comfort while casting worried glances across the table towards Sansa.

That night Sansa does not come down for supper in the hall and she barely touches the dish of lamb and pease stew her maids leave her. Instead she devours Jon’s words, few as they are.

His letter is a sorry thing now, half-singed with the ink smudged and unreadable in places. She runs a finger over each word, tracing markings that are as familiar to her now as the lines on her hands.

_He might die. He might die and never know that I…_

It is the very thing Sansa has forbidden herself from dwelling on, but now that he is missing she cannot banish it from her mind so easily.

“Sansa?”

Arya stands in the doorway, dressed in her nightrail, her hair coming loose from its braids.

 _Not even the courtesy of knocking_ , Sansa thinks, wiping hurriedly at the tears that stain her cheeks. _It seems my sister’s manners have improved little since we were apart._

Sansa is about to yell that she wishes to be left alone, when Arya takes a tentative step into the room.

“Sansa, I-I had a dream and now I can’t sleep. I thought I could–can I stay?”

Sansa stares at her sister a moment, stunned.

There was a time when Arya’s request would not have seemed so strange.

Sansa was seven when she was moved from the nursery into her own chambers. At the time, she had been pleased and thought herself quite the grownup lady, but during her first night in her new chambers, little Arya had arrived at her door shaking from nightmares. Sansa had always been secretly glad to see her sister. Her new rooms seemed too big and too quiet, and she had missed the snuffily breathing of her younger siblings, and Old Nan’s stories, and the toys and books that littered the nursery floor.

“Can I stay?” Arya asks again.

Sansa nods, just as peculiarly glad to see her sister as she was on that night all those years ago.

Sansa doubts it is bad dreams that have brought her sister to her door this time. Arya is brave, and nearly a woman grown.

_Soon Father will be finding a match for her too. Another young man to wed and bed and die…_

Tears burn at the back of Sansa’s eyes. She tries to blink them away, but Arya’s sharp stare sees all.

“Alys is still crying,” Arya says, shuffling in on stockinged feet, before hurriedly crawling onto the mattress beside Sansa. “She’s always crying.”

“She worries for Robb,” Sansa finds herself defending their goodsister. Tears came often to Alys since she started to round with Robb’s child.

“But Robb is at Castle Black with Father, not–” Arya’s voice falters, her unspoken words stinging like a slap to the face.

_Not lost. Not like Jon._

Arya draws her knees up to her chest and rests her pointy chin atop them.

“Do you love him?” she asks quietly.

Sansa is not sure how she feels. Not when so much between she and Jon remains uncertain, unspoken.

She is tempted to turn up her nose and say that Arya will understand when she is older, but she bites her tongue and simply says, “He is my husband.”

The answer seems to serve, for Arya scoots closer, her skinny arms wrapping around Sansa’s middle.

“Jon will be alright, Sansa. I know he will,” Arya says fiercely. “He is good with a sword. Better than Robb, even. And he’s trained with some of the best fighters in Westeros. Ser Barristan the Bold and Ser Arthur and Ser Jaime…”

Sansa has never thought much of the hours Jon spends in the training yard. So often in their life at Queenscrown, she had despaired of the time he wasted sparring, when she would preferred he dance or write verses instead. Now she finds she is grateful Jon was so dedicated to his training, if it means he will come home to her.

“Thank you, Arya.”

The next morning, Sansa steals out of the keep while the household still sleeps. She means to light a candle to the Stranger, but finds her steps lead her away from her Mother’s little sept and towards the godswood instead.

These are Jon’s gods. If there is anyone she should entreat for help, it is them.

It is her first time seeing the hearttree since returning to Winterfell. As a girl, she had never liked looking upon the face of the old weirwood, but there is something comforting in finding this place unchanged.

Sansa sits at the base of the tree, as she’d seen her Father sit in prayer countless times before. She removes her glove and presses her hand to the white bark, red sap sticky beneath her fingers.

“Come back,” she pleads to the ancient, carved face before her. “Please, come back my dearest, Jon.”


End file.
